Communities =/= products. An entirely different kind of thinking and patience is required to grow a community as opposed to build a product.
People that really love what you do will "spread the word" and bring new people.
But you design, engineer, build, and test a product, not a community. Though we do try.
Value doesn't come only in the form of software. Only software devs believe that.
Building up a community and building a product are completely different things. You can have the perfect product yet never get any community. You can get a great community without even a product.
I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out.
To be prepared if there was success? I don't know
> How do you know how much they spent?
Because the CEO talked about it in another comment
> And two years to build that site?
Yup. A lot of iterating and trying to find the right fit. Why is that so hard to believe?
> I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out
That's the thing - you have almost zero information about this, so declaring all of these things to be obviously-avoidable mistakes is just silly. If you think you would do a better job you're welcome to try, but learning about a company for <5 minutes I don't think there's any possible way for you to make that call.
Makes me think, maybe it's time to create a "bootstrapped" badge, or something like that; something that sites that didn't take VC money could proudly display? At least for me personally, whether something is an investor startup or not is an important data point for deciding whether to invest my time in it.
www.hellolyra.com
Hasn't been updated in a while though.
I mean, the K-factor is either greater than 1 or it's less than 1. If it's less than 1, you can have 100s of years go by without gaining a meaningful audience. If it's greater than 1, then they would have seen that in their retention/cohort/signup analysis. Even, if only a sub-segment of their users were growing at a >1 K-factor, they would not have shut down. Since their shutting down, that's clearly not the case.
It's really difficult to offer perspective like that on something you don't really understand and haven't seen from the inside.
It's pretty clear if you don't have product-market fit as a founder. And if you don't have a really good idea of what you could do to get to product-market fit, it's entirely possible it's wise of the founders to stop and try something new, which is what I hope they plan to do now.
Much love to Dan, Jessica & the Imzy team. I know how hard this can be; best of luck on whatever comes next.